Who will operate it?

Abstract

We now come to the most important part of a word processing system — people. No matter how advanced the technology, we are still reliant upon the skill of human beings to make it work. The success or failure of a system depends entirely upon the people who will operate it. Note that I said ‘people’ and not ‘person’, because a word processor does not only involve a girl sitting at a keyboard. The originator also plays an important part. The time will come when all an executive has to do is to pick up a microphone and dictate into it, and the machine will produce perfectly-typed, beautifully set-out hard copy directly from his dictation. When it does — unless standards of dictation are very different from what we experience today — some extremely peculiar letters will result.